This tape contains the fifth of a series of teachings on the Book of Acts by the Reverend John W. Howe of Truro Episcopal Church in Fairfax, Virginia. The teaching is entitled, The Sacraments of the Gospel, and covers the second chapter of Acts, verses 38 through 47. There's a subject which we could very fruitfully spend a long time in dealing with in its own right, but which it seems to me we can't avoid touching on at least before we move on. The issue is the nature of the sacraments, in particular the nature of baptism and the Lord's Supper. Now obviously we're going to be dealing with something in extremely brief detail that is enormously complicated and of interest and concern down through the history of the Church.

It's one of the great tragedies that these two great vehicles of God's grace, which he gave to the church to make us one and to express our union, have been probably the most divisive areas of debate and theological inquiry and churches separating from each other down through the last 2,000 years. So I probably won't be able to answer all of the questions in the next few minutes. But I want to touch on the subject of the sacraments at this point, Because if you've been following what we have said, and in particular the sermon that Peter gave on the day of Pentecost, and what immediately follows thereafter, both baptism and the Lord's Supper come up at precisely this point.

So, having dealt with the hard stuff, you know, the baptism of the Holy Spirit, now we'll move on to something relatively easy, right? We were looking last time at Peter's invitation. and he ended his sermon by saying in chapter 2 in verse 38 repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit and we pointed out and I want to just mention again that the normative pattern throughout the book of Acts we have not yet demonstrated that but I think it will become clearer and clearer move on.

The normative pattern in the book of Acts for becoming a Christian brings those three elements together. Repent, be baptized, receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. And you really can't talk about one without the others.

Now, I want to quickly add that in our experience we may appreciate, we may experience various dimensions of God's renewing activity in our lives in a variety of patterns. But the normative biblical understanding is that these three things, these three elements, if you will, are inseparable from each other. And that as a matter of fact, if you experience them apart from each other, that's out of the ordinary and immediate steps are taken to correct the imbalance.

That's a crisis situation. If you say you've repented, you have put your faith in Christ, you have been baptized, and you are lacking in some way the gift of the Holy Spirit or the empowering of the Holy Spirit. That's a crisis.

And they take immediate steps to find out what's wrong and how do we remedy it. That raises a very important question, and some of you came up to me last time and raised the question, well, why then do some churches, and in particular, why does the Episcopal Church baptize infants? It would seem as if that formula would be speaking about people who are old enough to make a conscious decision, a conscious act of the will, that involves an adult kind of an understanding.

We're clearly aware of the fact that different churches see this differently. And how do you account for that? I want to touch on this as far as time will permit us.

The church in the Middle Ages had evolved its understanding of baptism to the point where it said a rather strange thing, it seems to me. What it said baptism does is it washes away all of your sins up to that point. And then after that point, you're on your own, you see.

So you've got to make up for that by doing various kinds of penance and various kinds of prayers and so on, which led people by the time of medieval theology and medieval church discipline to do a very interesting thing. They would delay their baptism to their deathbed if they possibly could. Then you cover everything up to that point.

And if you time it just right, you just go right into the heavenlies and spend no time in purgatory. The problem is you dare not wait too long. See?

I mean, that's kind of a dicey business. there's a superstitious view that begins to develop down through church history and it's sort of it it comes from exactly the same mentality as that but it goes to the opposite extreme instead of delaying it to the last possible moment you do it at the earliest possible moment and some of you i know you've felt that it's come right down into our generation where we've got to get the baby done. That's how it's expressed.

That's an Anglican phrase. Get the baby done, right? And woe to you, see, if something happens to your baby before he's done.

I want to label that. I already have. I want to say it again.

That's a superstitious view. That's a view that treats baptism as if it were magic. grace that we do this for people, see?

We get the baby done, or the old man, or the old lady, whoever it is, we get them done. And I would just say, I mean this very seriously, it's a flippant comment, but I really mean it, that if I believed that baptism operated in that way, that it operates apart from faith, I would go out and consecrate the nearest fire truck and spray everybody in sight. Or in today's technology, I'd go up and consecrate a cloud.

I mean, I really would do that. If we thought that the sprinkling or the pouring or the immersing of water all by itself apart from faith was effective, wouldn't you do that? You'd go out and spray everybody in sight.

We don't believe that. And I don't think anybody has really believed it in that hard, ridiculous extreme that I've just taken it to. The point is that baptism nowhere is spoken of as operating apart from faith.

Apart from faith. But those who have practiced the baptism of young children and even infants believe that it operates by virtue of the faith of their parents. It's not apart from faith.

but that there is a faith dimension that God honors when parents enter into covenant with him on behalf of their little ones. That's a very different issue. Let me sum this up as quickly as I can.

The Old Testament view is consistent that God deals with us through families. He deals with us through families. You take a verse like Proverbs 22 and verse 6.

Most of you can probably quote that back to me but it's a promise from Almighty God. Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, what? He will not depart from...

That's a promise. To whom? To the parents.

It's not to the kid. It's to the parents. You do your part in bringing up your child to know and love the Lord, and when he's old, there may be some slippage.

There almost certainly will be some slippage. Okay? But when he's old, when all is said and done, he will not depart from it.

Now, mind you, there is content to that. It doesn't just say try to be a nice parent. You know, you can go back into Deuteronomy 6, for instance, which is the classic passage in many, many, many, many other places where it gives content to what that means.

Deuteronomy 6 talks about instructing your child when he wakes up, when he walks by the way, last thing before he goes to bed, training your child, insisting upon God's standards, teaching him God's statutes, bringing him, not sending him, bringing him to the assembly to worship and so on. But God makes that kind of a promise, and he makes it consistently. You do your part in faith, in training this child, and when he grows up, he's going to own it in his own name.

The other side of the coin, I would say one of the most frightening verses in the whole scripture, if you really think about this, right in the middle of the Ten Commandments, It says the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children. That is not a statement of justice, but that is a statement of fact. And you've seen it.

Mom and dad are irresponsible. Kids are going to suffer. Dad blows all his money on the horses.

Kids are going to suffer. Mom gets fall down drunk every night in the gutter. Kids are going to suffer.

The sins of the fathers are visited on the children. So God deals with us through families. He invented the family.

I'm interested, you might jot this down in your margins somewhere, you take a look at what it says when God institutes circumcision as the sign or the mark of the Old Testament covenant. And he does not say, when your son is grown, I will make a new covenant with him. He says on the eighth day of his life, he's to be included in the covenant.

He has no say about it. My covenant with you, Abraham, is that you will include your son. And he has no say about it. He's included in the covenant with the father.

He does not make a new covenant with Isaac. He does not make a new covenant with Jacob. He does not make a new covenant with any of the children of Jacob.

When he deals with David, Solomon is included, and so on. The covenant itself was from one generation to another. Now, the second thing that I need you to be aware of is that it was Jewish practice for approximately 200 years.

We don't know exactly when this began, but round figures. It was Jewish practice for approximately 200 years before the coming of Jesus to baptize Gentiles who wanted to become Jews. Many of you have heard me mention this before.

Most people are not aware of that. You know, we think of the fact that if you were a Gentile and you wanted to become a Jew, all the men would be circumcised, okay? But for something like 200 years, in addition to that, the Jews baptized all proselytes, as they would have called them, all Gentile converts into Judaism, okay?

And that's all, not just the men. That's men and women, boys and girls, and it is very clearly demonstrable that baptism was practiced for little ones, before it ever became a Christian activity. As a Jewish activity, it was extended to the whole family when the family converted.

The Rabbi Hillel, who lived, he was an older contemporary of Jesus. We don't have any record that they ever met, but he's one of the great spokesmen. If you go on to a university campus, you'll probably see a Hillel house.

Hillel was one of the great spokesmen of Jewish Orthodoxy, and at one point he had the temerity to say that baptism is more important for a convert into Judaism than is circumcision. That's a fascinating little historical reference. You begin to see some rather far-reaching implications for John the Baptist's ministry, if you really think about that.

See, most of us think that John invented baptism, but not at all. Not at all. He took over something that was already being done by the Jews to Gentiles who wanted to become Jews.

And what was new about John's message was, even you Jews need to be baptized. That's the real thrust of John's ministry. He said, you think that because you're descended from Abraham, you've got your relationship with God all sewed up.

But I tell you, unless you repent and be baptized, God's going to be very angry with you. Now that casts some very interesting light, doesn't it, on all sorts of things? Because we've just said that God deals with families one generation to the next.

We've just said that God instituted circumcision and that the little boy born into a Jewish family has no say in the matter, and yet John the Baptist says he's got to have faith in order to make his circumcision amount to anything. You follow that? And his faith is represented by his baptism.

And yet, at the same time, John is picking up a practice that was already being widely used, and as a matter of fact, not only by the Jews, by lots of other ancient peoples, as a sign of conversion into a given culture. A sign which explicitly was extended to the small children and the infants, if there were any, in the household. Now, when you move into the New Testament, I remember going through seminary, and somebody handed me a little pamphlet one time, and it said, What the New Testament says about infant baptism.

And I opened it up, and it was completely blank. So it is something of a moot point, and that's why all the controversy. But when you move into the New Testament, you find a phrase repeatedly used.

You find it in particular in the book of Acts. So-and-so was converted, and he was baptized and his whole household with him. You remember that?

And you read that over and over and over. You read about Cornelius. And he was converted and he was baptized and his household.

Lydia was baptized and her household. The Philippian jailer was baptized and his household. Paul writes to the Corinthians and he says, I didn't baptize anybody.

Oh yeah, I baptized Stephanus and his household. Right? You cannot absolutely prove that when it uses that phrase, it includes little children.

But in light of the fact that that was the common practice, there's a very strong case to be made. That since the conversion of a family was considered to include the little children, when that practice was taken over into the New Testament, a very strong case can be made that it was done in precisely that way. I call your attention to verse 39 of Peter's sermon.

Chapter 2 of the book of Acts and verse 39. Right after he says, repent, be baptized, receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, he goes on to say, for the promise is to you and to your children and to all that are far off. God continues to deal with us through families.

It's to you and your children. The promise to the Philippian jailer when he says, Men, what must I do to be saved? Is repent and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, be baptized, and you will be saved and your whole household.

You see? So the issue is, if you put all that together, of course, of course, children need, as they grow up, to know and trust in Christ in their own name, in their own right. They need to own for themselves what has been done on their behalf.

but the alternative to saying that God would include my children in the covenant relationship that I make with him is say no he doesn't he leaves them on their own to fend for themselves he makes no provision for a little child to be raised in the fear and admonition of the Lord he has no vested interest in the children of believers that's a very hard world view quite in in contrast to the way that God has revealed himself working throughout history just as we do everything else for our little tiny children. They wouldn't survive physically were it not for us nurturing them, right? He gives them to us as a responsibility just as we do everything else for them.

So God expects parents to raise their children to know and love him to the extent that they are able according to whatever age, whatever maturity, whatever intelligence they have. Kathy, my daughter is becoming aware of the fact that this is an election year you know and we see all these ads on television for the candidates and she turned to me the other evening and she said Daddy, what are we, Republican or Democrat? Now think about that that's the kind of a question your kids would ask you up to a certain age, right?

what are we what are we as a family our family either is going to believe this or it's going to believe this what are we daddy do you see that's exactly what god expects now there comes a point where kathy's going to have to make those decisions for herself and she's going to have to decide about Jesus for herself. But God has made a promise to me and I'm taking him at his word that if I do my part to bring her up to know and love the Lord Jesus, he has a vested interest in her. All right?

And baptism then is the sign of God's covenant not just with me as a lonely individual but with me and my little ones for whom I am responsible before the throne of grace. Okay? You say, but children aren't old enough to understand.

That's the same way of putting the very issue we've been dealing with, but let's push it one step further. You show me anywhere, anywhere, I challenge you to do this, show me anywhere where faith is made a factor of understanding. It is not.

Faith is to operate with understanding. Faith is to operate over and above understanding. Okay?

I put it the way I did a minute ago. We're to exercise our faith up to and including the level of our understanding, but it's not a factor of understanding. Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, gives us two illustrations of what it is to have faith.

Consider the lilies. Consider the birds of the air. Now, what is their IQ?

Do you realize that when Mary, who has the embryo Jesus in her womb, I guess he's about to become a fetus at that point. Think of that, a fetus in her womb, comes to visit her old cousin Elizabeth, who is carrying John the Baptist at that point in her womb. It says that Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and John the Baptist leapt for joy in her womb.

How old do you have to be to begin to respond to the grace of God? Isn't it ironic? I mean, this is really funny.

That the man whose very name is the Baptist responds to the Holy Spirit, responds to the gospel of Jesus at a younger age than anybody on record. Isn't that interesting? I want to put it to you that you are never too young to begin to respond to the grace of God.

You are never too young, and it is nowhere dependent on attaining some arbitrary level of intelligence or understanding. A mongoloid baby is not outside the grace of God. All right?

It is not that he has to pass some IQ test in order to qualify. A baby who dies in infancy is not outside the grace of God. All right?

Martin Luther, interestingly enough, turned that very issue around, and he said, if you want to tell me that you've got to be a certain age, you've got to attain a certain level of understanding, let me ask you, how old do you have to be? Have you ever known anybody who at age 25 or 45 or 65 made a decision for Christ, and six months later bailed out. So then what do you say? Was he not old enough?

It wasn't real? He didn't understand enough? If you tell me there's got to be some sort of an arbitrary level of maturity or understanding or intellectual input, I say to you, there is no way that I know when that takes place.

There is no way. Okay? So faith is to operate up to the level of understanding and above it.

But it's not dependent upon understanding. Sometimes people, especially those who, let's say, were baptized as very small children or even as infants, and then reach some point of much more dramatic conversion, or God touched their lives in some much deeper way, and they entered into a relationship with Christ that they never had previously. They may even be highly critical of their parents.

Well, they took me to be done, but they were nowhere in their own faith at the time. It was just a ceremony. And as a matter of fact, those clergy in that church didn't know any more about it than my folks.

Can any of you identify with that? and so now they've entered into something very exciting with Christ and they say I want to renew my baptism I want to be baptized all over again I'd like to caution you against that on two grounds number one you dare not cast dispersion on God's character in honoring a baptism that was done for you however, however inadequately. If you ever come to real faith in Christ, if you ever do that in the course of your lifetime, there is a sense in which the grace of God began in your life before the foundation of the world.

When were you written on his palms? When was your name put in his book? All right?

So you can't say, it just began yesterday when I committed my life to Christ. It began before the foundation of the world. How dare you say that God wasn't present at that baptismal service, in spite of the inadequacies of pastor and parents and whoever else was there.

But secondly, and really much more importantly, it's important that we see the relationship between baptism and the Lord's Supper. because when you do, when you see the relationship between baptism and the Lord's Supper, you will see that the way to renew your baptism is by coming to the Lord's table. That is precisely what God wants us to do.

Every single time you come to the Lord's table, if you do it rightly, you are renewing your baptism. Why do I say that? Because baptism and the Lord's Supper mean exactly the same thing.

They mean exactly the same thing. They're given to us in different symbolism, but the symbolism means exactly the same thing. Baptism.

What we're symbolizing is death, burial, resurrection. We bury you in the water. You're raised to new life.

Okay? Whose death? Christ's death.

And I'm identifying myself with his death, burial, and resurrection. I'm identifying myself with his death by faith. But what's happening in the Lord's Supper?

We're symbolizing the breaking of his body, the shedding of his blood, his death, on my behalf. And as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you do show forth or proclaim the Lord's death until he come. You follow what I'm saying?

Both of them mean exactly the same thing. with the difference that baptism, by definition, is the initiation ceremony. That's how we start.

That's external. That's a physical word, if you will. That's an enacted testimony.

And by definition, it's once at the beginning. It's not repeatable. Whereas the Lord's Supper is as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup.

So baptism is associated with rebirth, and the Holy Communion is associated with rebirth and with nourishment, and it's continual. That leads to the second part of the material for today. I want you to notice what it says here in verse 42.

Well, back up, 41. So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about 3,000 souls. And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship to the breaking of bread and the prayers.

And fear came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were done through the apostles. And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to all as any had need.

And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they partook of food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved. We want to touch on that community experience next time.

I want you to notice that with regard to the breaking of bread, the earliest communion experience, the earliest communion experience was daily. And it was in each other's homes. And we know that on the very first day there were at least 3,000 people.

And then there were more added every day after that. There is no way that daily you're going to get 3,000 people together in one place to break bread. There is also no way that the apostles are going to preside over all of those meetings.

They're in each other's homes. The clergy didn't preside because there weren't any clergy. As a matter of fact, it is very likely that the woman of the house presided because that's Jewish practice.

Interesting argument there when you consider women's ordination. The earliest experience of communion was a real meal, just like we've just had here. It was much more like a potluck supper than what we experience upstairs in the church on a Sunday morning.

they came together they had all things in common they had a potluck supper and in the middle of the meal they stopped to recollect as they broke bread that jesus identified himself with broken bread as they shared the cup of wine which is what jews drink with their lunch and their dinner right down to the present day the water isn't that drinkable okay they identified that cup with the other cup that Jesus said is the New Testament in my blood. Communion, the English word communion, means common union. Common union.

And the sharing of this kind of a meal was a very visible expression of the unity of Christ's body that he calls us into. And in fact, Paul comments on that in 1 Corinthians. He says, the bread which we break, is it not a common union?

Or RSV says participation, but common union. Is it not a communion in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.

Again, this is much more vivid if you take literally a single loaf and you break it up and distribute it. But the imagery, the symbolism here, comes down to you are what you eat. If we eat of one bread, we become the bread, or the bread becomes us.

In one bread, we are members one of another. Do you see what I'm saying? That's what's being expressed.

And therefore, and we're going very, very fast, but I would caution you to go back and check me out on this one. Go back in your leisure and re-read 1 Corinthians 11 in the light of that. Because you are going to see a totally new implication of the admonition that Paul gives when he says, whoever eats and drinks without discerning the body, eats and drinks damnation or judgment to himself.

That has become, for some traditions, a brief for supposing that the bread literally becomes the physical body of Christ, and the wine literally becomes his physical blood. And they read that to say, if you eat that bread without understanding that you are eating his literal body, if you drink that cup without understanding that you are literally drinking his physical blood, you do damnation unto yourself. Nothing could be further from Paul's mind.

I say that very strongly. Nothing could be further from Paul's mind than that. You read it in the context in which it comes.

What he is talking about is our oneness. What is the body of Christ? what is it it's us we are the body of christ and what he's saying there if you dare to presume to come to the lord's table without discerning that at one in the same time you are one with all the other people who also are coming that as you eat of the one bread you are one with all of them if you treat this as some sort of private relationship between you and the lord himself that doesn't involve other people, you are utterly missing the point of the communion experience and you bring judgment upon yourself.

And in 1 Corinthians 11, Paul rebukes the Corinthians in the strongest terms because what happened in their potluck supper was this. They would come and some would hoard while others went hungry. They would come, and some, if you can imagine this, in a meal to be identified with Christ's body and blood, would get drunk in the middle of the celebration while others went without.

What kind of an expression of common union is that? Paul says this is not the body of Christ that's being expressed. This is not oneness.

And I rebuke you. And he says from now on, something brand new. Instead of coming for a real meal, which you have so utterly abused, instead of that, I now instruct you, you eat your real meal at home, and you come to a symbolic meal.

Just a little bite of bread, just a little sip of wine. And from that point on, that's the way it's been. I think there's absolutely nothing wrong with our getting together for this kind of a real meal, and in the midst of it, stopping to recollect.

that Jesus took the most common elements, bread, wine, and said, let these be vehicles of your identification with me in my death. Most of the times when we have a dinner party at our home, a real meal, we'll stop, and as we say the blessing, we'll pause to recall another loaf of bread that was broken on our behalf, another cup of wine that was shared in recollection of his blood being spilled. Okay?

But as far as the formal gathering of the church as the body of Christ, we've been given instructions, and it becomes a symbolic meal. But the symbolism is still the same. And what it's expressing is precisely the same thing as expressed by the baptism.

Christ's death, burial, resurrection to new life on my behalf, my identifying myself with him by faith. and those of my household. And if you want to renew your baptism, the way to do it is come and participate in faith in the Lord's Supper.

It's interesting to me, these two sacraments are called the sacraments of the gospel. There are other things which down through Christian history have sometimes been called sacraments, but these two are called the sacraments of the gospel. Why?

Because both of them express the gospel. Okay, they are physical words. Isn't it interesting that within moments of the first proclamation of the gospel, we're addressing the matter of the sacraments of the gospel?

Isn't it interesting, finally, that God would take our incarnation, our being, physical people, so seriously that he would give to us physical, visible words as well as ones that you hear with your ears. Isn't it interesting that a God who is concerned for the Mongoloid child would give a way of expressing faith that is physical rather than one that depends upon an ability to understand concepts. Do you see the graciousness of God here?

I caution you to take none of this because I've said so, but to search the scriptures for yourself.